Ship Crew - Reasons to have multiple people on a ship

[Fifthdread]

As of now, there are not many reasons to have a huge crew. Sure, you can build a ship with multiple manned guns. Sure, you can have your friends mine out a space station while you fly the ship around. Sure, you can have a carrier with fighter ships your friends can undock and man. Even still, I feel like there should be more. I want there to be general benefits by having multiple players on one ship.



I'm not saying this should be like Star Trek where you have an engineering, a tactical station, and a pilot. I'm not saying there should be repair parties, ship's security, or other activities for crew mates to participate in. At the same time, what if you could have stuff like this?



Let's break this down by scenario to make this easier.



First is combat. As of now, you can have your crew get in docked ships and man turrets. What if they could do something other than that to help with the battle? Perhaps repair the hull of your ship as it takes damage? Maybe they could augment the shields somehow? Could they provide tactical information to the pilot or the gunners using some sort of interface allowing them to cycle through cockpit cameras? Maybe it would be cool to have some sort of "spy" who could hack into the enemy ships tactical systems (shields maybe) and do some sort of minigame to stop shield regen or even weaken the enemy shields. I know some balance people are freaking out right about now- relax it's only brainstorming. I hope someone replies with the ultimate solution to the crew problem.



Second is mining. Right now, when you have your friends mine using the mining lasers, the person piloting the core gets all the materials. Instead, what if the person using the gun got the materials- or maybe the mining computer could link to storage, allowing the material to get offloaded into the linked storage location. One guy could be sorting the materials or whatever. Not sure how creative mining can get with a crew. Anyone have an idea on how to make this cool?



The biggest problem right now is my crew getting bored during travel. What if we allowed the crew to do other activities aboard the ship. The next part will be different ideas for shipboard activities.



-Ship Management

Having the ability to interface with the ship itself is fun. Maybe each system aboard the ship could have a control block. For example- Thrusters, Shields, Weapons, Power... all of these could have control blocks for management. Right now, weapons have control blocks which allow you to fire the guns. I feel like it would be cool if you could actually tweak these systems on the fly using control blocks. Perhaps you could underpower some systems and overclock others. Having the ability to go to the control blocks and adjust things like thrust power, weapon stats, power allocation, and shield regen/capacity would be a neat idea. Perhaps even allow crew members to take from one system and put power into another. If you are trying to escape, take power away from weapons and give them to thrusters. This could allow you to get the thrust to get you to top speed faster- especially in larger ships. Not sure how well these ideas would work, but they are just that- ideas.



-Activities

Maybe having chill activities for the crew to participate in would be cool. Trading, player interaction, and other things can encourage players to work together, but they don't necessarily encourage players to be in a "crew" on a ship. There should be ship specific actions available. There should be specific reasons to go to a planet, be at a space station, or be on a ship. I hope there is some discussion over what sort of activities there could be.



-Weapons

Let's be realistic- manning the guns IS a large part of having a crew. That being said, let's make it easier and useful to have a crew manning these weapons. For gun turrets, have a "remote access control block" which can be linked to turret docks. This could allow players within the ship to access the turrets. By linking to turret blocks you eliminate any strange balance issues with remote controlled turret cores or ships. Another weapon idea is to have a missile which can be controlled. A drone missile. Have a player in the weapon computer shoot and pilot these missiles to the target would be cool.



-Tactical

As far as a tactical station goes, let's add a player controlled drone/probe to the scene. Allow a probe / drone computer which would let you control a drone, allowing for a player to have a 3rd person perspective of the ship. This probe could even act as a "cockpit" allowing the pilot to see through the camera if they switch to it. Maybe even have a small screen with the drone's perspective... :P Just ideas. Maybe even allow the drone to see things that a normal pilot doesn't see, like extra stats, hull damage indicators (color coded hull - green good - red bad) or even have enemy tactical stats on the enemy ships. Any ship probe is looking at gives the player tactical data on that ship (shield strength, weapon cooldown info, and maybe even add trajectory prediction allowing the gunners to get an additional indicator assisting them leading their shots. Just some ideas. I am sure this could be balanced. I am also sure it could be simplified a little.



Anyway, can I get some dialog? Maybe someone telling me that these ideas were already talked about 7 pages back?



Edit: Also, what if they added player controlled shields- like have a shield computer that a player could control allowing them to "block shots" with a direction related shield? He could reduce the damage of shots coming from certain directions...

 

[mixxit]

i totally agree with this! wish resources were MUCHHHHHHHH harder to come by so this would be a reason to do this

 

[Fifthdread]

While having less resources would promote cooperation and group created ships, it would take away from people who want to play solo. I don\'t want to have to take away from those \"lone wolf\" players, but I do want to have incentive to work together on a single ship- at least have options to do so. Strong options. If someone designs a ship to be piloted by one person than that\'s all good. While I do feel like you can get rich really easily as of now, I do feel like making the game tedious by making it super hard to get resources isn’t the best way to go.

 

[Yarp]

Yes, some reason to have a full crew compliment needs to be brought in. While solo play should not be detracted from to get there, battle-wise, a ship with three players inside should have a fair to probable chance of beating three smaller ships each with one player, given a similar team mass ratio and competent planning on both sides.

One activity might be cryogenic chambers players can activate for long journeys. While sleeping, players experience beautiful dreams of designing their very own space ship. Thanks to big-brother brainwave monitoring and the obsoletion of personal rights to privacy, ships designed while in hypersleep are automatically uploaded to the intergalactic ship database, allowing convenient purchase at the nearest parts store.

For the nearer future, perhaps the Technobeam could be reduced to a weaker hand-held version? A pistol that repairs the block it strikes rather than breaks? I imagine whack-a-mole hull repairs going on. Possibly the most boring job ever, but theoretically helpful. Hand this weapon to the green recruit. For that matter you could have someone else with a power drain and powerbeam gun as well... and a backpack full of batteries. Also not incredibly fun the way I envision it, but very possible. Set phasers to suck.

I really like the drone idea. Could even be used to control fighters. If done this way, your crew is not risking their neck to go out in tiny deathtraps. I do hate to say it because someday the deathtrap strategy could help balance the risk-reward ratio of fighters. Then again, drones could have their own risk-reward balance. Get too far away and the radio signal is lost... that drone is now powering down - drifting away! Smooth move. Time to pull out that cortical neck-snake, there, Neo. Go aim your wimpy Technobooster at a wall and pray.

As for tactical stations, you could have situations where shields only resist proportions of damage, letting a certain amount of damage through. That proportion of how much the shield resists and how much seeps through could be controlled by \"how in or out of tune\" it is with the anitmatter bolts hitting it (assuming AMCs are still the best way to take down shields). A spectrum, perhaps with a slider bar or two would determine the \"frequency\" of oscillation of the shields. Should your opponent be rotating his frequencies of AMC fire in the same way and happen to approach/match your frequency, the two will harmonize, multiplying the damage done and negating any and all absorption but perhaps recharging your shields! (Yay! Oh, wait, this means they\'re really strong ...by not doing anything). Of course, finding that golden frequency takes some hunt and peck work. The color of the splash against your shield will tell the enemy whether he\'s getting hot or cold. If he gets too close to finding it, it\'s time to sweep away the rug again. It\'s time to move the sliders. The better you are at keeping the goalposts moving, the longer your hull will last and the shorter your shields will last. Of course, a Bobby AI might be set up to rotate this for you if you\'re playing solo, but any pattern you set can eventually be figured out, no matter how many Bobby AIs you dedicate, chaining them together to do it. Even if the sheilds have a complex enough frequency rotation pattern, it doesn\'t mean they can\'t still fail from maxing out the amount of damage they can absorb, same as ever.

As for the guy trying to work the weapon\'s computer against this, think of the game Simon. \"Was it Beep Beep Boop Beep Bomp Beep? Or Beep Beep Boop Beep Bupp Boop? Dammit!\"

If hitting the same frequency recharges the shields, you might have the reverse game being played, where the shield-room operator will intentionally take a few hits with matched frequencies, sacrificing a few hull blocks for a quick shield recharge rather than having the shields fail entirely. After his quick refresher, he\'s back to rotating away. As long as nothing critical got hit in that window. Just exactly who is playing cat and who is playing mouse might depend on how far down the shields are exactly.

 

[towerbilder]

I agree with more use for crew but most of this is a nope and the reparing ships in-flight well made me wonder if he has even played the game becuse you can do that already if I had to come up with a idea I think some interface to redirect power so having crew can mean thay can focused that unused power storage to increase speed the trustees handle or turning rates even boost weapons and make the shields more resilient and recharge faster at the cost of power this I think will make crew of 5 at least so 4 fixing the ship and 1 controlling power

 

[Yarp]

@towerbilder - I didn\'t know you could repair a ship in-flight. To my knowledge, besides using the Technobeam, blocks can only be replaced but not repaired. Please let me know if I\'m overlooking something. On the other hand, you\'re right, the current speed of replacing would admittedly nix any usefulness of repair, as things stand. But other status quos may be alterable if the idea is fun enough to warrant. Fun being the operative pursuit!

I think repair work could easily be the most boring role ever, explaining why above. I\'m just following the thread lead, I\'m just throwing some ideas out there.

As for your variant, I am intrigued. How would you make \"4 fixing the ship and 1 controlling power\" fun? I like interfaces, as you mention, but am leery of making any ship system \"better\" carte blanche by virtue of having it babysat. I\'m looking for meaningful complexity, which I know you want too. We\'re on the same page, here. What kind of gameplay flavour might be expected as, say, one of the four repairing?

As a silly comparison, I once played a game for a day or two called \"Puzzle Pirates\" which unashamedly gives themed mini-games to a full ship\'s compliment of real players, the benefits of success in the mini-games is increased ship performance. It worked quite well, but the minigames got very repetetive very quickly. I like Tetris, but not that much. I think some children and grandmas still play Puzzle Pirates, though it does seem very successful. How to avoid that design pitfall?